Amazon Lightsail vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Broadcom are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #7 with an average rating of 9.0, while Broadcom is ranked #13. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 2.0% mindshare in PSP, compared to Broadcom’s 8.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Amazon Lightsail

Read 13 Amazon Lightsail reviews

990 Views
990 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Read 15 Pivotal Cloud Foundry reviews

5,441 Views
5,387 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Amazon Lightsail

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Amazon Lightsail both compete in the cloud services category. Amazon Lightsail seems to have an edge with its cost-effective pricing, making it a preferable choice for smaller projects.

Features: Pivotal Cloud Foundry offers advanced scalability, robust deployment, and excellent monitoring, ideal for stable Java applications. It integrates seamlessly with CI/CD platforms and supports secure internal transactions. Meanwhile, Amazon Lightsail is known for its usability, fixed pricing, and easy setup with pre-configured instances, making it appealing for small to medium-sized projects.

Room for Improvement: Pivotal Cloud Foundry could simplify deployments, enhance integration with tools like Kubernetes, and improve documentation. It also requires more sophisticated features and easier migration options to public clouds. Amazon Lightsail needs to improve support and documentation, disk management, and auto-scaling, with greater flexibility in software updates and backward compatibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Pivotal Cloud Foundry is robust but complex in setup, requiring technical support, and is versatile across hybrid, private, and public clouds. Amazon Lightsail targets ease of use in public cloud environments, particularly for non-tech users, though it tends to rely heavily on community support resources.

Pricing and ROI: Pivotal Cloud Foundry has higher, variable pricing reflecting its comprehensive features, potentially offering substantial ROI for large-scale transformations. Amazon Lightsail provides predictable, affordable pricing ideal for small businesses and startups, favoring cost-effective and straightforward deployments.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Lightsail vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Lightsail vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry

September 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Lightsail

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

7th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

13th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon Lightsail is 2.0%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 8.9%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon Lightsail	2.0%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry	8.9%
Other	89.1%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

VictorAugusto De Souza E Silva

Cloud Engineer at Leek Solucoes

Has simplified website migration and reduced hosting costs significantly

Amazon Lightsail should have some kind of scale service. To be more clear, if I need to scale up my instance or VPS, I need to create a snapshot and create a new instance from this snapshot with more resources, such as CPU, RAM, or disk. It would be beneficial to have a welcome instance where we can just set the instance, go there to edit and select a greater instance from large to x-large or 2x-large. I do not see the need to scale down, but it would be good too. When we are on an x-large for testing purposes and need to do a rollback to a large one, we need to scale down. We do not have this capability on Amazon Lightsail.

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Vasundhara Joshi

Senior Software Engineer at Wells Fargo

Seamlessly scalable since applications written in Java and .NET do not create issues for its users

Regarding the setup phase, every step is a hurdle. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, I won't get any proper resources for that. Even if I Google it, there is no proper solution for Pivotal Cloud Foundry. However, if we go for Azure or some other cloud, we can get a lot of information. I believe there is not much information for Pivotal Cloud Foundry since it may be some license issue. If you go for Azure, the migration process is straightforward. Since we have been given 10 GB of space in the public cloud, we are utilizing it in our company. So, we are trying to deploy our application on the cloud, and for us, it is like a trial process for now. From our total application rate, I can say that only two to three percent is on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Currently, half of the code is in the shell script, which is causing issues. Also, most people in my organization have worked on Java-related code. For most of the applications, they are using the same, that is, shell script and AUTOsist, and so we haven't migrated yet. So that is the reason that we are planning to opt for a hybrid model so that we don't have to migrate completely to Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The most valuable features are the usability and customer service."

"EC2 instances are pre-configured and upgraded, so you can simply select and instantly pay for an EC2 instance to set up WordPress, Node.js, or a server container using Docker."

"In Lightsail, they simplified to do it in as few clicks as possible. So, around ten clicks, I have a virtual machine deployed."

"The instances optimized for WordPress are very lightweight and straightforward in configuration."

"The intuitive management console of Amazon Lightsail is very good because it is simple; with just a few clicks, I can set a blog online, a WordPress blog online, a new e-commerce online, or just a new application with NodeJS."

"I find Lightsail particularly valuable for hosting WordPress as it is easier to set up than a bare metal server, which requires extensive configuration and package installations."

"The benefit of using Amazon Lightsail over the AWS console management is that it is a small platform that is easy to understand, as it has only the instance, DNS, Route 53, snapshots, backups, and load balancing network."

More Amazon Lightsail pros

"It is a scalable product...We are not facing any particular issues since most of the applications in our company are written in Java and .NET."

"It provides a set of developer-friendly tools that simplify application deployment."

"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."

"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use."

"We find its stability and scalability valuable."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java."

"The solution is stable and resilient. In our company, we do not even see any challenges with the solution."

"Stability is not a concern with this product."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry pros

Cons

"When you need to add some custom rules to Amazon Lightsail, the auto scaling feature is a bit difficult."

"I don't see this solution as enterprise-ready, for bigger companies like banks."

"Currently, there is limited support available while installing or configuring it, and resources are primarily available through community-contributed articles."

"Amazon Lightsail needs more security in the networking because hackers can attack in application layers three and four."

"The solution could be smoother than it is."

"Backward compatibility and the flexibility to choose software versions while installing would be improvements."

"The disadvantage I see is data storage; if any data crash occurs in the cloud server, that will lead to significant losses for the customer."

"The main area for improvement in Lightsail is the difficulty in scaling down resources."

More Amazon Lightsail cons

"Regarding the setup phase, every step is a hurdle. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, I won't get any proper resources for that. Even if I Google it, there is no proper solution for Pivotal Cloud Foundry."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced features."

"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve the documentation. They are good, but they could improve more. Additionally, it would be beneficial if there were more use case examples."

"It is not straightforward to setup."

"Something that can be done better is canary deployment. So, right now, we're using blue-green deployment. The support for canary deployment would be nice."

"I'd like to see a larger service offering."

"There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of Pivotal Cloud Foundry."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The services that it provides are good for the price."

"The affordability of starting at five dollars makes it an attractive option for startups and medium-sized companies, aligning with budget considerations while offering essential cloud services."

"Amazon Lightsail is a bit cheaper than Amazon EC2."

"Lightsail is available at an affordable cost starting from five dollars per month."

"The prices are better than EC2 machines, for instance, because they are simplified management, but it works well, and I am able to run everything that I need on it."

"A few months ago, Lightsail's pricing increased, likely due to the addition of the new VPC feature."

"It's very cheap."

"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."

"We do pay for the licensing cost because we have opted for a private cloud setup. So, it is a cloud setup, and we have to make payments based on the cloud size. I do not consider it very costly when comparing it to the market."

"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."

"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."

"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."

"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

University

11%

Financial Services Firm

38%

Manufacturing Company

17%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	11

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Lightsail?

In Lightsail, they simplified to do it in as few clicks as possible. So, around ten clicks, I have a virtual machine deployed.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Lightsail?

Lightsail is available at an affordable cost starting from five dollars per month. This cost may increase with additional features like a static IP.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Lightsail?

See all answers

Which would you recommend - Pivotal Cloud Foundry or OpenShift?

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a cloud-native application platform to simplify app delivery. It is efficient and effective. The best feature is how easy it is to handle external services such as database...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 33% of the time

Google Cloud vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 28% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 10% of the time

AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 8% of the time

Render vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 8% of the time

More Amazon Lightsail Competitors

Red Hat OpenShift vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 32% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 30% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 12% of the time

Google Cloud vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 7% of the time

Heroku vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 5% of the time

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Lightsail

October 2025

Download Amazon Lightsail product report

Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

September 2025

Download Pivotal Cloud Foundry product report

Also Known As

No data available

PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)

Overview

Lightsail is ideal for simpler workloads, quick deployments, and getting started on AWS. It’s designed to help you start small, and then scale as you grow.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is the leading enterprise PaaS, powered by Cloud Foundry. PCF provides a cloud-native application platform that allows you to continuously deliver any app to every major private and public cloud with a single platform. PCF is proven to accelerate feature delivery with higher developer productivity and a 200:1 developer to operator ratio. PCF's built-in security and self-healing capabilities reduce risk in your app portfolio while maintaining high-availability at scale to keep customer facing systems online even in the most challenging circumstances. pivotal.io

Broadcom

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Humana, Citibank, Mercedes Benz, Liberty Mutual, The Home Depot, GE, West Corp, Merrill Corporation, CoreLogic, Orange, Dish Network, Comcast, Bloomberg, Internal Revenue Service, Ford Motor Company, Garmin, Volkswagen, Solera, Allstate, US Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, ScotiaBank

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Lightsail vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry

September 2025

Free Report: Amazon Lightsail vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry

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